More Worlds!
by prokofy on 16/12/06 at 6:52 pm
By Prokofy Neva, Dept. of Planets, Worlds, Universes, Metaverses, and the Eternal One
Game-World Sun-God Ra Raph Koster has made a new game! WOOT! Those who remember the game-meister of Star Wars Galaxies and have followed his amazingly rich and insightful interactive blog adventures were thrilled to find out that this enlightened Horus of the MMORPG Horizon, who thoughtfully straddles games like SWG as well as worlds like SL, announced yesterday that he’s leading a company making a….thingie called Areae.
And instead of a big-ass press release and roll-out with industry friendz blurbs, he has a modest, tiny-print statement on his website explaining the absence of the usual PR: “We wanted to talk to you first. People who might be players, virtual citizens, users, customers, some day in the future. And that’s because we want to make sure that putting you guys first is something that is in Areae’s DNA from the very beginning.” Hmmm…sounds from that like it could be a game/country/platform/business application!
For gamers and worlders used to devs ranging from indifferent to hostile, this will be welcome news, even if likely something very hard to sustain.
Raph doesn’t say whether it is a questy sort of game or social world (we’re trying to get it out of him now) — but he does say it will be “many places, many worlds” in keeping with its Latinate meaning — suggesting it’s going to contain user-created content and be open-ended at least in places.
I suspect we won’t be seeing dinosaur media and scandal-ridden apparel firms announce their presence there lol. It’s hard to know what it’s like because Raph isn’t giving out much details on the game’s website, but he did reply to my query about why the website’s picture looks like Toon Town (see picture above) — no, that’s not what the world itself looks like inside.
Predictably, the Web 3.0 and areolae jokes are being made but the buzz is a’ buzzin’. We can’t wait! However, we can only say: take your time! Take as much as you need! Don’t release some buggy, laggy mess as Second Lifers are SO hungry for more, better worlds!!!
Suddenly, all that time Raph has been labouring talking to gamers and Infamous Antagonists on his blog seems to make sense — if a new and different thing and better thing will come out of it. An interesting discussion on whether games or worlds are better is going on here.
Now, with Raph’s recipe for a good game firmly in mind (“instant enjoyability, guiding users, rewarding experiences on a regular basis, obvious interfaces, a premium on seamlessness [no lag, no disruptions, etc]“), I was off to check out another new game someone is trying to virally market by putting postcards in coffee shops and hang-outs in New York City.
And I think this rather unimpressive world is actually indicative of many such worlds to come — we will be awash in worlds! Supplegame perhaps takes its name from the concept of “supplements” or being “supple” — who knows? but it feels like a really bad copy of the Sims, is dirt-simple to learn, and is addictive only in the way that chemical-laden Pringles are addictive — until you figure out to buy the Hint of Lime Tostitos.
In a scene vaguely taken out of the Devil Wears Prada or something, you enter the world with a very simple one-click download trial for 60 minutes (before having to pay $19.95 or read manuals or figure out lots of hard stuff). You find yourself in an ongoing soap opera where you are Arin, an office worker trying to make nice to her boss, win promotions, seduce co-workers, and do other game-like activities from our modern real lives.
Naturally, as a hardened and hard-core Sims player, offline or online, I wasted no time in having Arin dis her co-worker, shuck her stupid “research job,” insult her boss, and go to the bar where she proceded to get totally wasted bitching to a sympathetic bartender, first on $15 beers, then on $25 martinis — her game account dwindling alarmingly.
The scenes are three-D — but to say they are three-D is to say that the flash ads on www.yahoo.com are 3-D now. It’s the kind of 3-D that will never warrant Walker’s attention lol. You can’t move into the scenes even as much as the Sims Online, and when you flip them back and forth, sometimes confusing things happen.
Drinking her life away in the bar, my Arin had no clothes, and soon, like her Sim forbearers, began to stink, or as the game-masters put it delicately, her “wardrobe began to lose power” (Janet Jackson’s PR folks should remember that phrase).
Going back to the office, Hugh was disgusted, her performance at the typewriter sucked, her bank balance was near the eviction stage, but still silly Arin went to the store to try on luscious pink lingerie in the hopes of winning over Hugh. Hugh, unlike his Sims ancestors, refused to do something like “give present” that would have had her hopping into the lingerie and then winding up for a quickie in the bedroom before they both had to go back to the office to top off their game points (instant jobs are available by clicking on their computes and such).
It’s a very simplified and seemingly dumbed down version of the Sims — but it may just have a following, especially among younger kids who might find even the Sims Online mini-hurdles of having to build a house and deploy and learn job objects just too hard. You’ll be gratified to know you *never* have to go to the bathroom, but the cyber is going to have to get very inventive, given this set-up, from the liner notes:
“The game contains sexual content (consisting of an intimate sex scene continuing for approximately 15 seconds and not involving any nudity), sexual innuendo (consisting of suggestive language), and scenes involving drinking alcohol in a bar. Please note however that Supple contains no violence, no negative cultural stereotypes, no profanity, no car chases, no explosions or other special effects. Supple does contain lots of clever dialog, interesting personalities and simulations of human relationships.”
For mass-marketers eyeing games laciviously, there’s something that will make Tony Walsh indignant — there are advertising spaces all over — signs, pictures, squares etc. For now, they seem filled with the game’s own brands, but they hold out the problem of marketing RL brands some day.
As for Raph’s concept of good games, Arin’s World had instant enjoyability — I could either go get her roaring drunk and watch her “drunk” bar rise with satisfaction and her “anger” bar dissipate, and ignore her dangerously low “performance skills” for a happy 30 minutes. The interface was so simple that I kept clicking on it to make sure I wasn’t missing something. If you work, you get money, you advance — they must have studied a little bit of Will Wright, but Supplegame is like a kind of bastardized version of Will Wright’s exquisite Sims.
I stayed an extra 30 minutes merely because not only were there NO grey squares, there was absolutely NO lag whatsoever. I kept stress-testing it to see if it would lag or grey out. It was seamless. Um, we have a winner! Except…it takes more to make a game than those five features Raph helpfully outlined…but there is something missing.
Other people!
Unless we’re supposed to all enjoy making Arin game fanfic…Still, with Raph’s intriguing announcement and more little games cropping up here and there, we can glimpse some light on the horizon.
Patience, Second-Lifers, mo’ betta worlds are a’ coming! While they are all in beta, get on the ground floor!
BTW, Raph would neither confirm or deny that there will be real estate in Areae. I cannot imagine calling a thing by a name that means “many places” and not having land…for sale! Perhaps I am about to be amazed?
Ordinal Malaprop
Dec 16th, 2006
For “intriguing”, read “yawnsome”. I’m sorry, I know Mr Koster is a top chap and everything, but teaser campaigns for vapourware which is *still hiring developers*, well, it’s so 90s. I’ve had so many advertising bods throwing “cryptic” sites and billboards at me that I now respond to “ooh, don’t you want to know about this? but… we’re not going to tell you!” with “piss off and tell me when you’ve actually got a product”.
Prokofy Neva
Dec 16th, 2006
Oh, ok, Ordinal, thanks for that corrective. I just think Raph’s writings are intellectually compelling and his blog is generally a good read. You’re right, though, his game may suck, true. The proof is in the pudding and there isn’t even a box of instant dessert yet.
I guess he is doing enough research though about what went wrong in other games and what needs to be done right now to satisfy all the constituences. Of course, the results may come out looking like Komar and Melamid’s ideal American painting — George Washington, deer, and Hudson-School like landscapes.
I guess you’ll have to make do for now with getting Arin out of the bar and into that nightie!
Cocoanut Koala
Dec 16th, 2006
Although that game you were in sounds kind of fun/funny (I assume everybody else in it is NCP’s?), what someone needs to come up with is a game where people can make things and sell them.
Then, if too many people come in for free, perhaps they could limit the “making things and selling them” to only the paying customers.
Perhaps they could also provide the paying customers with such things as Linden Answers, abuse report responsiveness, forums, etc. (Without banning the paying customers from them whenever one employee decides he doesn’t like a particular paying customer.)
After all this time, I think Anshe was more right than we ever knew when she divided people into those with a stake, and those who were tourists.
Of course back then, there were no free players, just basic and premium, and her distinction didn’t even hinge necessarily on that.
But today – with hoardes of free anybody’s and nobody’s, including children, griefers, and alts out the kazoo, maybe it would make a TAD BIT OF SENSE to start providing SERVICES to the PAYING CUSTOMERS instead of taking them away from everybody.
I think this could be done, and would work, and more people would pay to get those services (including being able to build, maybe even).
What doesn’t work is the notion that a paying customers will happily pay more and more to receive less and less, under worse and worse conditions, just so free, unverified anybodies can come in.
So if someone would just come up with – hmmm, SL – but designed with some sort of built-in brakes like charging people – then I would go to it.
coco
Prokofy Neva
Dec 16th, 2006
Coco, as I didn’t go beyond the test version of this Supplegame, I didn’t see if there were other people playing the other characters — that would be interesting — I don’t think so.
Ordinal Malaprop
Dec 16th, 2006
Well, less that whatever it is may suck – though of course it may – but more that I find this sort of promotional activity really tiresome. I agree that he is certainly worth reading, he is a smart fellow, and he seems to have some interesting people on board. The fact is that we don’t know _what_ they’re on board, and I find the cryptic “we know what we’re doing but we’re not telling, we’re just going to make a basic homepage and let you speculate” approach very off-putting, and more likely to make me cynical than interested.
Perhaps I am too much of a contrarian.
Truth in Jouralism
Dec 16th, 2006
Just letting the collective audience know that prokofy is in actuality a [elided by Uri on grounds of appeal to actuality].
Raph
Dec 17th, 2006
Ordinal, the main reason we launched the site was actually because we needed to get the word out there for hiring purposes. That’s why there is no product announcement, and why the interviews did were solely with industry trade sites rather than “consumer-facing” as the jargon has it.
But once we knew we had to do that, we figured we had better rleease as much as we could for everyone else. And alas, that wasn’t much, so we put it all in the cartoon.
But there’s some very astute speculation out there already.
glennvirt
Jan 22nd, 2007
Prokofy Neva, Dept. of Planets, Worlds, Universes, Metaverses, and the Eternal One
Hey Neva,
You missed the point about Supple by being a wise guy and not actually playing the game. The game is great — maybe best new game since the sims — it is not a sims clone or sims ripoff or even much at all like the sims. Did you notice that Hugh actually competes with Arin — The ai challenged sims cannot do that. Did you notice that Hugh and Arin and Margot speak and that the dialog coheres? No other game I am aware of can do that. Did you notice there was complicated and difficult to master strategy that was different from the strategy in any other game? How many new strategy games have there been where the strategy is entirely a different concept. Graphics? It’s downloadable, has to fit in small space so can’t use wizzy graphics engine. Capice?
Well, guys like you probably too friggin brain dead to appreciate something like this anyway, too stuck in same old same old rut that you will die in some day having grown old and lost the ability to experience something new.
Try it again — this time try to compete and win — try to enter into the game in the spirit within which it was made, probably for less money than they paid the office clones at Maxis when they made the sims.
cheers,
glennvirt
Trinity
Apr 21st, 2007
I picked up that Supple game one night out of boredom and unexpectedly, I liked it. Sure it’s no Sims (I happen to be a Sims 2 fan) and it’s rather linear but it sounds to me like you deliberately wanted Arin to “lose”, which is clearly not the objective of the game. I play all kinds of games (except shooters) and Supple is one of the better $20-games I’ve played recently.
kisha
Jun 1st, 2007
what if you already downlode this game and you want to play it again for free and longer.
kisha
Jun 1st, 2007
brittany
Nov 23rd, 2007
i love sims
victoria
Oct 12th, 2008
i love sims but i realylike supple so i want to buy it but my dad wontlet me